Eat Sausage and Waffles, Live to 112

Incredulous though you may be about this article, it sounds as if factors other than diet have produced longevity, irrespective of foods consumed .. or so it appears at first glance.

In my own family, there is an equally astounding case of longevity without heed to diet: my mother will turn 95 next weeks and for most of her life, she was quite disinterested in living a dietarily “sparse” lifestyle. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, was careful about her diet and lived to to be 104. So, perhaps there is some validity, but only for some people!

Back to the MSNBC article: George Johnson, considered California’s oldest living person at 112 and the state’s last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet. “He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles,” Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday.

Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson’s health.“All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets,” Coles said.“Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia,” Coles said. “He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer’s.